MAVRANOS’S head was lowered, but he was thrusting himself up the slope strongly with his good left leg; the right leg of his jeans was dark with blood. The faces of Pete and Angelica on either side of him were strained and expressionless with the work of supporting his weight as they climbed the slope. Angelica had apparently lost her carbine, but she was gripping the bottle of pagadebiti in her free hand.
When the path levelled out, Mavranos lifted his head, and his stony gaze swept down across the vine-covered cliff to Cochran. “Are there any of the,” Mavranos said through clenched teeth, “mud-kids still in the tunnel?”
Kootie had already disappeared into the tunnel, and Cochran plodded carefully to the cave mouth, stepping out wide of it and peering. The tunnel was nearly as dark as the mark on his hand, but beyond the tall, slowly receding silhouette that was Kootie he could see moonlit rock surfaces beyond the arch of the far opening, and no other people.
He shambled back to where Pete and Angelica and Mavranos stood swaying before he answered, for he didn’t want to seem to be calling down the tunnel.
“Nobody at all, but Kootie,” he said. “They all ran back to the fires, after they—when they—”
Angelica nodded. “We saw what they were carrying.”
“Then,” said Mavranos in an anguished voice, “who?”
“Sid,” said Angelica, “help Pete carry Arky.”
Cochran stepped up beside Mavranos, and Angelica got out from under Mavranos’s left arm and draped its weight around Cochran’s shoulders. And then Angelica went sprinting to the cave mouth and disappeared inside, still carrying the bottle. Drops of the wine splashed out onto the mud, and fresh leafy vines curled violently up out of the ground where they had struck, like convulsing snakes.
“I’ll watch her,” said Plumtree to Pete, and she hurried into the cave after Angelica. Cochran gritted his teeth, remembering that Cody hated caves.
“Come on,” said Pete, starting forward strongly; Cochran braced his right arm around Mavranos’s ribs and followed, and the two of them were in effect carrying Mavranos into the gavel-floored cave, in spite of occasional help from Mavranos’s one good leg.
Cochran could feel the short hairs standing up at the base of his neck at the sharp metallic smell that filled the tunnel, and when he realized that it was the smell of fresh blood he made sure to breathe only through his mouth.
Their footsteps crunched and sloshed along the puddled gravel floor, and over the hooting whistle of the wind Cochran could hear sea water crashing and guttering on rocks in the holes below the remembered iron railing that was invisible in this darkness.
“Crowd your wall,” he gasped to Pete, for the railing had been on the left.
Then he could see the iron railing below Mavranos’s dangling left hand, silhouetted against the luminous foam of the waves outside, beyond the rock wall. A seething bath, he recalled Valorie saying here, which yet may prove against strange maladies a sovereign cure.
As his shoes deeply furrowed the unseen wet gravel, he twice felt the brief entanglement of strips of cloth, and once he kicked a boot that rolled away too loosely to still have a foot in it—his feet didn’t bump anything that felt like flesh and bone, but he was still breathing through his mouth.
When Kootie had stepped out into the diffuse moonlight on the ledge over the water, and the hurrying silhouettes of Angelica and Plumtree had brightened with detail as they shuffled outside too, Cochran could hear footsteps rattling the gravel some distance behind him; but he couldn’t free his head to look around. Pete must have heard the steps as well, for he joined Cochran in striding along at a quicker pace.
At last the three of them stumbled out into the relative brightness of the moonlit cloudy sky. Kootie was standing at the seaward lip of the ledge, staring out at the dark Pacific Ocean. He was clearly taller than Plumtree now, who was braced against the seaward rock face beside Angelica, and he even seemed through some trick of moonlight and perspective to be bigger than the great stone profile, across the splashing gap to the right, which was itself staring out to sea in the same direction.
Cochran had to look away; an aura played about Kootie’s fur-draped shoulders, and Cochran’s eyes hurt when he tried to focus on the boy. He was aware of heat radiating from that side of the ledge, and he wondered helplessly if apotheosis might cause Kootie to spontaneously combust.
Mavranos pushed himself away from Cochran and Pete and stood swaying by himself, blinking around at the stone head and the other huge boulders and tumbled stones piled against this side of the Point Lobos cliffs.
Free of the heavy arm on his shoulders; Cochran quickly turned to look back down the tunnel. At least two silhouettes were trudging this way up the wet stone windpipe; and he was sure that the one struggling along on crutches could be no one but Thutmose the Utmos’, the dwarf junkie he had met at the Seafood Bohemia bar, apparently still desperate for a sip of the forgiving wine.
Cochran hurried across to stand beside Plumtree. “We got,” he gasped, “company.”
The figure in the aura at the seaward side of the ledge turned ponderously, rippling the gusty air, and through the optical distortions the inhumanly calm wooden mask nodded at Cochran. There was respectful greeting in the gesture, possibly even a blessedly remote affection, but there was also command.
Pete was braced against the wall beside Angelica, and now appeared to be holding her back from rushing at the god.
Cochran dug his cold-numbed fingers into his pocket and pulled out the soggy car-registration form.
The light was far too dim for him to read any words off the water-darkened paper; and in sudden abysmal panic he realized that he couldn’t remember one word of the Latin.
He lifted his right hand toward his face to rub uselessly at his eyes—and then noticed that the black mark on his knuckles seemed to radiate darkness, so that the letters on the paper shone clearly with the same intense, reflected blackness.
He took a deep breath of the cold wine-and-blood-scented sea air.
“Sole,” he read, calling loudly to be heard over the wind whistling in the tunnel at his back, “medere pede: ede, perede melos” And now he remembered the translation the woman had given them: O Sun, remedy the louse: give forth from yourself, and give forth from yourself again, your devoured limb.
The masked figure that was no longer recognizable as Kootie was shaking, and Cochran could feel heat on his eyes. He stepped back, raising his hand to throw a cool shadow across his face, and saw Long John Beach shamble out onto the ledge.
Cochran tensed and stepped around in front of the man to grab Plumtree’s arm; but the old man was cowering, and his single arm was shaking as he pointed behind and above Cochran.
The waves of the sea glittered silver as a wash of bright moonlight swept in from the horizon toward the shore with eerie speed, and then the full moon was suddenly above the cliffs, shining down onto the rocks, and Cochran could see a naked, bearded man, seeming to stand as tall as Michelangelo’s David, on the top of the George Washington boulder.
Cochran shivered, flinching in the moonlight. Dionysus and the Moon Goddess, for this, he thought. It must have been Diana’s baby blanket that called her.
The tall figure in the wooden mask shifted ponderously around to face the boulder, and Cochran’s eyes narrowed against the radiant heat.
“No!” shouted Long John Beach into the eddying wind. “Wait, listen to this person!” Still cowering before the mask and the moon, he nevertheless shambled out across the ledge toward the masked god. “Look who thinks he’s nothing,” he said in a whimper; “but the voice from the sky said, ‘Let go of the tree.’” More loudly, he called to the expressionless mask, “Now you’re killing the boy! Take—take this body—it’s presumed to do a lot of your proper work, in its time—and it’s … pruned.”